1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for obtaining a medical image data set. In addition, the present invention relates to a device and a system for obtaining a medical image data set.
2. Description of the Prior Art
When acquiring medical images, for example, with a modern x-ray apparatus, a computed tomography, (CT) scanner, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) device, a large amount of data is generated. Here a distinction is made between a raw data acquisition and further image processing, for example, image reconstruction. When obtaining a medical image, for example, by means of an MR measurement, raw data are obtained, which come directly from an image converter, in the case of an MR device MR signals detected (acquired) by receiving antennas, or which come from downstream, relatively simple image processing devices, for example, an analog-to-digital converter, so the data are available in digital form. The raw data of the imaging device can be supplemented by further administrative and/or metadata, for example, a time stamp, channel information, etc. In an MR system with, for example, 128 receiving channels, it is currently possible to obtain up to 512 MB/sec of raw data, depending on measurement and parameterization. Generally, the raw data are not comprehensible for a human viewer, for example, a physician. They have to be first transferred, for example, to a spatial image data set through very complex further processing. Depending on the complexity of this further processing, for example, MR image reconstruction, high technical requirements are placed on the devices performing the process of further processing, and/or the entire or part of the data volume has to be stored temporarily on appropriate storage systems for further processing, or the data volume has to transferred to different computers.
Usually, the data volume has to be stored and/or transferred in its entirety. The storage media or network connections have to be dimensioned in accordance with the data volume and/or data rates to be expected. As a data buffer, it is common to use, for example, a so-called hard drive RAID system, which is configured from a specific number of hard drives on which the data volume is stored with the use of parallel write access.